6 ms·

Oracle is shutting down its ad business

86 points by thm 2y ago

JacobHenner 2y ago
Oracle had an ad business?
- tanelpoder 2y ago
  Reminds me of the IBM Cloud slogan: "We have a cloud?!" I think it was @quinnypig who coined it...
  - refulgentis 2y ago
    @quinnypig's tone[1] wears on me a bit. I don't mean that in judgement, we all suffer from followers disease[2]. I just don't like the effort of having to parse through the tone of everything to figure out what's actually going on. For instance, here, the original B2B tech company, still turning over billions upon billions, wouldn't provide the base unit of B2B tech? Really? Interrobang of surprise at that? I don't think so. You'd have to be very young and made 0 effort into ex. checking IBM's business metrics over the course of your lifetime. [1] my current standard for this is "how long would you feel people were talking about your efforts accurately, if they talked the same way you do?" -- standards are leaky and hard to word. [2] The Algorithm has multiple tentacles, you end optimizing for your most engaging behavior
  - sidewndr46 2y ago
    I figured the IBM slogan would be something like "We have a product people actually want to buy?"
  - Gigachad 2y ago
    Oracle cloud has the most generous free tier ever. I've got a 24GB ram VPS on it that I have run a minecraft server on for the last year. Never paid a dollar for it.
    - ralphc 2y ago
      Did you have to put up a credit card for it?
      - _lvbh 2y ago
        Yes, and they’re notorious for rejecting credit cards. They can also shut down your machines at any time if paying users want more capacity. I moved off after they killed my machine and caused me to lose a bunch of data because I couldn’t spin up another (capacity full)
- mtillman 2y ago
  They bought a ton of adtech companies (primarily data providers) in the 2010ish range. As one of my former colleagues said, "the lawyers at Oracle considered cookies to be on-prem software" which says a lot about Oracle's view of advertising. If you're really successful, you either become a media company, a bank, or a consulting firm. Oracle is firmly #3 while companies like Apple figured out how to become a media company and a bank. Though it's a little early to claim "figure out" I suppose.
  - chucke1992 2y ago
    How Oracle is able to survive these days? I guess the moat of Oracle DB?
    - munk-a 2y ago
      Consulting fees for said DB and escalating DB licensing costs. They have an atrocious reputation and I'm honestly amazed they invest as little into training sessions/cold call advertising as they do.
    - cool_dude85 2y ago
      I think they offer a lot of niche-market products that all sort of work together as a "suite" with the core product of course the db. I work in the utility industry and they are present everywhere. Of the products I'm immediately aware of, they have a billing data system, a meter data system, and an enterprise asset management system. They try to sell upper management that all components work together easily, and because IT is not our core business, this is an enticing pitch to the chief level audience.
    - jl6 2y ago
      They sell to execs, not to developers, and they have a lot of certifications and assurances that make them "low risk" to that audience.
    - skissane 2y ago
      Mostly due to acquisitions, they own a huge range of business applications, both generic (such as Peoplesoft and NetSuite) and industry-specific (e.g. Cerner in healthcare). These kinds of apps tend to have high lock-in: once your business is running on one or more of them, migrating to something else can be an expensive megaproject. Also, historically they had a big push for their apps to use their own tech products (DB and middleware), so the tech side of the business benefited from the apps side. Although, I remember when I worked there (6+ years ago), they were trying to move away from that somewhat, and cloud apps teams in particular were being given more freedom to use whatever technology they thought was best for their product rather than forced to adopt Oracle Whatever. Plus, acquired products run on all kinds of different tech stacks, since (at least my personal impression was) the tech stack wasn’t a huge concern in deciding what to acquire
- johannes1234321 2y ago
  Isn't it core of ad tech, that average public doesn't know who got their data?
- tcmart14 2y ago
  Not gonna lie, I honestly have the same reaction.
- Matsta 2y ago
  We use Oracle's Grapeshot (they acquired them in 2018) which is a solid platform for audience targeting and brand safety for ads. The product is still working since the news broke this week, and my assumption is they are going to try and sell it on as it's still a solid product and performs wells and brings us nice ROAS (Return on Ad Spend)
oneplane 2y ago
Imagine what would happen if Oracle were to shut down its legal business.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
noobmax 2y ago
[dead]
schnable 2y ago
> In August 2022, Business Insider reported that Oracle Advertising made $2 billion in revenue. At the time, revenue was only growing by 2% a year and many employees had been laid off as part of a reorganization in 2022, Business Insider reported. Did Oracle correctly predict that the business was contracting significantly and manage decline with layoffs? Or did they overcompensate for slow growth and kill a $2 billion business?
- bpodgursky 2y ago
  GDPR, death of 3rd party cookies, and mobile app data-sharing crackdowns is a big obstacle for adtech. If they hadn't been investing in server-side integrations, all $2B could easily have been at technical risk.
  - 1oooqooq 2y ago
    knowing Oracle (and sap) they probably didn't had a supplier/demand kinda of ad business. they probably bought all the companies aggregating data in a way that was kosher under gdpr and would corner the compliance market. but then nobody cared for real about any of that and there was never the market they hoped. taking this out of my butt. but is very likely from the little bits i had to interact on ad ecosystem from them (mostly tools to companies in the compliance traffic validations, which did take on in the late 2000s)
    - munk-a 2y ago
      I'm sure there are one or two counterexamples but ad-tech clients were very resistant to GDPR and nearly all violated the requirements. Even to this day a lot of international market advertising companies will adhere to GDPR in region and violate it out of region - the site banners are a separate issue and are usually rolled out by content platforms to all clients for simplicity.
      - bpodgursky 2y ago
        > international market advertising companies will adhere to GDPR in region and violate it out of region Nobody cares what nonsense the EU tries to claim about EU citizens living outside the EU. GDPR doesn't matter if you're operating outside of the region.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
chucke1992 2y ago
It had one? lol
Matsta 2y ago
It is pretty sad to hear - we've had solid results with Oracle's Grapeshot (segment audiences and brand safety for programatic advertising). We were meant to meet them in person next week but got cancelled at the last minute. I've heard all products will run normally, and everyone still has a job. However, they don't know what will happen in the near future. I assume Oracle is trying to flip off all parts of the business; if not, they'll shut them down.
- secondcoming 2y ago
  Really, I’ve heard their audience segments were garbage
  - Matsta 2y ago
    Fair enough. We run about 10 different providers and automatically scale spend on who works best. Grapeshot is usually up in the top 5 for us.
  - soared 2y ago
    They were just a dumb pipe for most of their segments, but the bluekai branded segments were better than the completely unverified nonsense you might accidentally buy if you weren’t careful. Addthis was always garbage, dlx is good, etc. just a process of vetting vendors which the hotline used to be able to help with.
- shostack 2y ago
  What sort of measurement setup and process are you running to compare these and properly control your experiments?
  - Matsta 2y ago
    It's pretty simple: ROAS (Return on Ad Spend). All our campaigns are performance-based. If one segment provider/SSP does well, it automatically scales spending. Likewise, if the performance drops.
dotcoma 2y ago
Why did Oracle set up an ad business in the first place ??
- nine_k 2y ago
  Because it was lucrative? Oracle have some expertise handling large amounts of data, and also have easier access to large corporations which other players do not necessarily enjoy. It sort of worked, the revenue was in the billions.
  - Gormo 2y ago
    Why didn't they start a streaming TV service or open a chain of fast-food restaurants? Those things are lucrative too, and also benefit from competence at handling large volumes of data.
    - steve_adams_86 2y ago
      Those ideas might be missing the networking part. I’m not sure if their people know the right people. I’m also not confident their track record would inspire confidence in their ability to execute on that type of service. It doesn’t seem well aligned. Ads on the other hand aren’t so far fetched.
riiii 2y ago
I would never have advertised a single iota with oracle. The fear of having my pants audited off would have caused premature death.
- soared 2y ago
  They were just a pipe, you had to spend dollars through a different vendor and used oracle stuff as an add on.
  - riiii 2y ago
    So you didn't have to make a contract with oracle?
    - soared 2y ago
      Big spenders made contracts for reduced pricing, but anyone could use oracle data with a few clicks (most wouldn’t even know the data was going through Oracle). That was a big issue when I was there - execs could not handle not being able to predict revenue and so they wanted every big spender on contract, so they reduced prices for them. Then we stopped providing support for anyone who wasn’t on a named account list.
yegle 2y ago
I guess we can remove a few hostnames from adguard/pihole blocklist now?
waynesonfire 2y ago
Same thing that happened to AT&T.
chevman 2y ago
Anyone know if Eloqua is included in this spin down? https://www.oracle.com/cx/marketing/automation/ https://www.oracle.com/cx/marketing/automation/
- soared 2y ago
  From what I’ve read they haven’t discussed how the spin down will affect any of their products.
cco 2y ago
So GCP gave their database business to Oracle and Oracle just shut down its ad business?
sitkack 2y ago
Smart!

86 points by thm 2y ago

JacobHenner 2y ago

Oracle had an ad business?

tanelpoder 2y ago
Reminds me of the IBM Cloud slogan: "We have a cloud?!" I think it was @quinnypig who coined it...
- refulgentis 2y ago
  @quinnypig's tone[1] wears on me a bit. I don't mean that in judgement, we all suffer from followers disease[2]. I just don't like the effort of having to parse through the tone of everything to figure out what's actually going on. For instance, here, the original B2B tech company, still turning over billions upon billions, wouldn't provide the base unit of B2B tech? Really? Interrobang of surprise at that? I don't think so. You'd have to be very young and made 0 effort into ex. checking IBM's business metrics over the course of your lifetime. [1] my current standard for this is "how long would you feel people were talking about your efforts accurately, if they talked the same way you do?" -- standards are leaky and hard to word. [2] The Algorithm has multiple tentacles, you end optimizing for your most engaging behavior
- sidewndr46 2y ago
  I figured the IBM slogan would be something like "We have a product people actually want to buy?"
- Gigachad 2y ago
  Oracle cloud has the most generous free tier ever. I've got a 24GB ram VPS on it that I have run a minecraft server on for the last year. Never paid a dollar for it.
  - ralphc 2y ago
    Did you have to put up a credit card for it?
    - _lvbh 2y ago
      Yes, and they’re notorious for rejecting credit cards. They can also shut down your machines at any time if paying users want more capacity. I moved off after they killed my machine and caused me to lose a bunch of data because I couldn’t spin up another (capacity full)
mtillman 2y ago
They bought a ton of adtech companies (primarily data providers) in the 2010ish range. As one of my former colleagues said, "the lawyers at Oracle considered cookies to be on-prem software" which says a lot about Oracle's view of advertising. If you're really successful, you either become a media company, a bank, or a consulting firm. Oracle is firmly #3 while companies like Apple figured out how to become a media company and a bank. Though it's a little early to claim "figure out" I suppose.
- chucke1992 2y ago
  How Oracle is able to survive these days? I guess the moat of Oracle DB?
  - munk-a 2y ago
    Consulting fees for said DB and escalating DB licensing costs. They have an atrocious reputation and I'm honestly amazed they invest as little into training sessions/cold call advertising as they do.
  - cool_dude85 2y ago
    I think they offer a lot of niche-market products that all sort of work together as a "suite" with the core product of course the db. I work in the utility industry and they are present everywhere. Of the products I'm immediately aware of, they have a billing data system, a meter data system, and an enterprise asset management system. They try to sell upper management that all components work together easily, and because IT is not our core business, this is an enticing pitch to the chief level audience.
  - jl6 2y ago
    They sell to execs, not to developers, and they have a lot of certifications and assurances that make them "low risk" to that audience.
  - skissane 2y ago
    Mostly due to acquisitions, they own a huge range of business applications, both generic (such as Peoplesoft and NetSuite) and industry-specific (e.g. Cerner in healthcare). These kinds of apps tend to have high lock-in: once your business is running on one or more of them, migrating to something else can be an expensive megaproject. Also, historically they had a big push for their apps to use their own tech products (DB and middleware), so the tech side of the business benefited from the apps side. Although, I remember when I worked there (6+ years ago), they were trying to move away from that somewhat, and cloud apps teams in particular were being given more freedom to use whatever technology they thought was best for their product rather than forced to adopt Oracle Whatever. Plus, acquired products run on all kinds of different tech stacks, since (at least my personal impression was) the tech stack wasn’t a huge concern in deciding what to acquire
johannes1234321 2y ago
Isn't it core of ad tech, that average public doesn't know who got their data?
tcmart14 2y ago
Not gonna lie, I honestly have the same reaction.
Matsta 2y ago
We use Oracle's Grapeshot (they acquired them in 2018) which is a solid platform for audience targeting and brand safety for ads. The product is still working since the news broke this week, and my assumption is they are going to try and sell it on as it's still a solid product and performs wells and brings us nice ROAS (Return on Ad Spend)

oneplane 2y ago

Imagine what would happen if Oracle were to shut down its legal business.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

noobmax 2y ago

[dead]

schnable 2y ago

> In August 2022, Business Insider reported that Oracle Advertising made $2 billion in revenue. At the time, revenue was only growing by 2% a year and many employees had been laid off as part of a reorganization in 2022, Business Insider reported. Did Oracle correctly predict that the business was contracting significantly and manage decline with layoffs? Or did they overcompensate for slow growth and kill a $2 billion business?

bpodgursky 2y ago
GDPR, death of 3rd party cookies, and mobile app data-sharing crackdowns is a big obstacle for adtech. If they hadn't been investing in server-side integrations, all $2B could easily have been at technical risk.
- 1oooqooq 2y ago
  knowing Oracle (and sap) they probably didn't had a supplier/demand kinda of ad business. they probably bought all the companies aggregating data in a way that was kosher under gdpr and would corner the compliance market. but then nobody cared for real about any of that and there was never the market they hoped. taking this out of my butt. but is very likely from the little bits i had to interact on ad ecosystem from them (mostly tools to companies in the compliance traffic validations, which did take on in the late 2000s)
  - munk-a 2y ago
    I'm sure there are one or two counterexamples but ad-tech clients were very resistant to GDPR and nearly all violated the requirements. Even to this day a lot of international market advertising companies will adhere to GDPR in region and violate it out of region - the site banners are a separate issue and are usually rolled out by content platforms to all clients for simplicity.
    - bpodgursky 2y ago
      > international market advertising companies will adhere to GDPR in region and violate it out of region Nobody cares what nonsense the EU tries to claim about EU citizens living outside the EU. GDPR doesn't matter if you're operating outside of the region.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

chucke1992 2y ago

It had one? lol

Matsta 2y ago

It is pretty sad to hear - we've had solid results with Oracle's Grapeshot (segment audiences and brand safety for programatic advertising). We were meant to meet them in person next week but got cancelled at the last minute. I've heard all products will run normally, and everyone still has a job. However, they don't know what will happen in the near future. I assume Oracle is trying to flip off all parts of the business; if not, they'll shut them down.

secondcoming 2y ago
Really, I’ve heard their audience segments were garbage
- Matsta 2y ago
  Fair enough. We run about 10 different providers and automatically scale spend on who works best. Grapeshot is usually up in the top 5 for us.
- soared 2y ago
  They were just a dumb pipe for most of their segments, but the bluekai branded segments were better than the completely unverified nonsense you might accidentally buy if you weren’t careful. Addthis was always garbage, dlx is good, etc. just a process of vetting vendors which the hotline used to be able to help with.
shostack 2y ago
What sort of measurement setup and process are you running to compare these and properly control your experiments?
- Matsta 2y ago
  It's pretty simple: ROAS (Return on Ad Spend). All our campaigns are performance-based. If one segment provider/SSP does well, it automatically scales spending. Likewise, if the performance drops.

dotcoma 2y ago

Why did Oracle set up an ad business in the first place ??

nine_k 2y ago
Because it was lucrative? Oracle have some expertise handling large amounts of data, and also have easier access to large corporations which other players do not necessarily enjoy. It sort of worked, the revenue was in the billions.
- Gormo 2y ago
  Why didn't they start a streaming TV service or open a chain of fast-food restaurants? Those things are lucrative too, and also benefit from competence at handling large volumes of data.
  - steve_adams_86 2y ago
    Those ideas might be missing the networking part. I’m not sure if their people know the right people. I’m also not confident their track record would inspire confidence in their ability to execute on that type of service. It doesn’t seem well aligned. Ads on the other hand aren’t so far fetched.

riiii 2y ago

I would never have advertised a single iota with oracle. The fear of having my pants audited off would have caused premature death.

soared 2y ago
They were just a pipe, you had to spend dollars through a different vendor and used oracle stuff as an add on.
- riiii 2y ago
  So you didn't have to make a contract with oracle?
  - soared 2y ago
    Big spenders made contracts for reduced pricing, but anyone could use oracle data with a few clicks (most wouldn’t even know the data was going through Oracle). That was a big issue when I was there - execs could not handle not being able to predict revenue and so they wanted every big spender on contract, so they reduced prices for them. Then we stopped providing support for anyone who wasn’t on a named account list.

yegle 2y ago

I guess we can remove a few hostnames from adguard/pihole blocklist now?

waynesonfire 2y ago

Same thing that happened to AT&T.

chevman 2y ago

Anyone know if Eloqua is included in this spin down? https://www.oracle.com/cx/marketing/automation/ https://www.oracle.com/cx/marketing/automation/

soared 2y ago
From what I’ve read they haven’t discussed how the spin down will affect any of their products.

cco 2y ago

So GCP gave their database business to Oracle and Oracle just shut down its ad business?

sitkack 2y ago

Smart!